And what's more, the experts blame the global change on falling - rather than climbing - levels of greenhouse gases.

What? But I though SUV's were evil! Is my car too small now? Am I not doing my part?

Lead author Thomas Crowley from the University of Edinburgh and Canadian colleague William Hyde say that currently vilified greenhouse gases – such as carbon dioxide – could actually be the key to averting the chill.

Fire up your coal furnaces, folks!

The warning, published in the authoritative journal Nature, is based on records of tiny marine fossils and the earth’s shifting orbit.

Earth's orbit is shifting? How did we manage to cause that? It's got to be our fault, after all.

Maybe we should try blowing up the moon or something. That would affect Earth's orbit.

The Earth has seen dramatic climate fluctuations – veering between cold and warm extremes - over the past three million years, the researchers say.

And changes in the Earth’s orbit and slowly falling levels of carbon dioxide are the cause.

The team says we are approaching a turning point, in the next 10,000 to 100,000 years, which will lead to the new ice sheets smothering much of Europe, Asia and South America.

Damn. And here I believed Ted Turner when he said we would all get to eat people in 30-40 years. Don't I look silly now?

The theory, which is based on computer models, suggests ice sheets will also slash sea levels by up to 300m, so Russia and Alaska will be connected by land.

The North Sea will become part of a huge glacier stretching from Holland and Scandinavia to the Russian Far East.

Professor Crowley said the stark findings do not mean we should stop fighting warming.

But he urged: ‘Don’t push the panic button.’

‘There’s no excuse for saying “we’ve got to keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,”’ he told Reuters.

But we have to DO SOMETHING!!! Run around in circles and wring our hands!

‘Geologically it’s tomorrow, but we have lots of time to argue about the appropriate level of greenhouse gases.’